The Mathematics of Web Search

During the past two decades we assisted at a technological
boost. From the first 3 web sites that the baby Internet had
(Microsoft, Netscape, and Amazon), to 800 million pages in 1999
and to over 50 billion pages today, the Internet has experienced
an exponential growth. Even a casual surf on the Internet is
enough to convince you that there is an enormous amount of
information and links available online.
However, all this information is useless unless we have a way of
searching and sorting it. From the first search engine Archie in 1990,
to the modern search engines we use today, the problem of
deciding the relevance of the information available online has been a
crucial issue.

In this module we try to analyze the mathematics behind one of
the most popular search engines, Google.
The first two lectures are self-contained and they can be read
independently. The subsequent two
lectures use however the material previously developed.